Ecology without Politics?

Abstract

Ecology without Politics? Catriona Sandilands (bio) The Ecological Thought. Timothy Morton. Harvard University Press. http://www.hup.harvard.edu. 184 pages; cloth; $39.95. In the final paragraph of Ecology without Nature (2007), Timothy Morton, having spent 200 pages arguing against the idea of Nature that informs most ecocriticism, makes a plea for politics. Specifically, he argues that "ecological criticism must politicize the aesthetic," by which he means not only getting rid of a consumerist, aestheticized Nature that is "over there," but also avoiding the opposite temptation to "join the nonhuman," thereby collapsing aesthetic distance but remaining caught in our own assumptions. We need instead to hold "our mind open for the absolutely unknown that is to come." Ecological politics, for Morton, thus involves acknowledging that we have the choice to hang out in the muck and muddiness of uncertainty—or more precisely, that we must begin ecological criticism from the obligation (shades of The Communist Manifesto [1848]) to "constantly and ruthlessly reframe our view of the ecological." The Ecological Thought is, by Morton's own admission, the "prequel" to Ecology without Nature. Although written accessibly to appeal to a more-than-ecocritical audience (the interested scholar can follow the trail of endnotes), there is no question that the book demands of its readers a ruthless reframing of ecological views. He begins with an argument familiar to readers of Ecology without Nature: that the modern era, even as it developed the possibility of ecological thought, has made that thought impossible to achieve because of our reliance on ideas of (external) nature, wilderness, and the like. The more we struggle to preserve Nature, the less we see what's really going on in the world of human encounter and connection with other beings. What we need is something entirely different: not just ecological thinking, but "the ecological thought," which is, as he writes, "the thinking of interconnectedness" itself, meaning both thinking about it and thinking from it. And the rest of the book spells out, employing an eclectic range of ideas and thinkers (Charles Darwin to Buddhism, Blade Runner [1982] to William Blake), what that thinking means, why it's a better view of nature than Nature, and what the consequences might be of the radical openness that he understands as integral to this ecological thought. The book is divided into three main chapters: "Thinking Big," which introduces two key ideas in the work, the mesh and the strange stranger; "Dark Thoughts," which expands on these concepts and reacquaints us with Morton's "dark ecology," a critical counterpoint to the "bright green" optimism in which he sees so much contemporary environmentalism unfortunately mired; and "Forward Thinking," which involves neither apocalypse nor prelapsarian fantasy nor posthuman deconstruction, but rather thinks "how to care for the neighbor," the absolute Others with whom we are inextricably interconnected. To suggest that these chapters present a mounting, linear argument would be, however, to misrepresent the book entirely: appropriate to the interconnected world Morton is describing—the mesh—the book does not offer so much a clear starting and ending point as it does a palimpsest of paths designed to disorient conventional environmental thinking in favor of a radical ecological uncertainty. Morton's case for the relevance of Darwin's evolutionary story of "proliferation, randomness, contingency, and useless display" thus joins up with Emmanuel Levinas's insistence on our "infinite obligation to others" (the kernel of Morton's idea of the strange stranger) and both weave through "a discussion of time…a detour through Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, then return." Time-lapse photography meets algorithms (with a little glimpse into monster movies) to explore an understanding of daffodils not as independent living beings but as little, moving compositions of formal processes, the same ones that produce human beings: "material organization turns out to be sets of formal relationships, not squishy stuff." And an interesting discussion of ecological art includes, among other things, fractal geometry, Virginia Woolf, John Cage, and noir film. I am less concerned than some readers might be with the slightly dizzying quality of these collected trains of thought, partly because I think it is appropriate to the...